Thanksgiving 2010

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.  I love planning the dishes, I love cooking and chopping and measuring and peeling and stirring all day with friends or family, and I love sitting down to a spectacular meal and being thankful for such a blessed life.  I do not love the clean up, but I am not above ignoring the mess until someone else takes care of it...

This year was my first vegan Thanksgiving.  I bought a Field Roast Hazelnut and Cranberry Stuffed Roast, and made mashed potatoes with Tofutti Better Than Cream Cheese and soy milk, green beans with mustard sauce, the Mushroom Gravy from Veganomicon, and this chestnut soup from C'est la Vegan--we roasted the chestnuts in the oven and spent about half an hour peeling them...!  Mom made Cranberry Sauce Made Easy and Sweet Potatoes with Apples and Walnuts from vegweb.com and some sweet corn.  Mom of course made pies--a vegan pumpkin pie (it didn't make it into the pic above!) and a not vegan apple pie.  They were delicious, as usual, though I think the best vegan pumpkin pie recipe is still waiting to be discovered.

Mom, the pie expert:

Stand outs were the chestnut soup and the sweet potato bake.  The chestnut soup (I used a couple tablespoons of Earth Balance instead of the soy cream) was silky and rich and the sweet potatoes had a crunchy, sticky coating that was delicious.  All three of us loved both these dishes.  I also loved the Field Roast, though I want to make one myself next year.

(There's the pumpkin pie!)

It's been quite a while since I've had Thanksgiving with my parents, and we had a great time and a great meal.  It was really sweet of them to do a vegan meal with me, though they were a little disappointed, mostly, I think, because a couple of the dishes were too strongly flavored for them.  For instance, they liked the seitan part of the Field Roast, but not the stuffing in the middle. Though none of us were crazy about the Mushroom Gravy, which I felt was too bland.

Here's Dad, looking a little sad...I hadn't noticed he wore a Thanksgiving Day running t-shirt for the occasion...

The dogs were busy playing around most of the day, but begging at the table was a highlight...

I hope your Thanksgiving was lovely and you have a restful, long weekend!

Pumpkin Chili, Salad, and Garlic Bread

I love food.  All food.  I think that's why my veganism is going to last: who cares if I leave out a couple types of food, I've still got so much to try and I love it all.

Not that this is an unusual or exotic meal.  Just the opposite, it's simple and it was easy and cheap.  I usually only have one dish in a meal when it's just me--I love one-pot meals.  But I used a couple little time-saving strategies here so that I had a three course meal every day...though it was still the same meal for a week...any one else do that?  I tend to have the same thing for three days in a row.  This lasted five!

The Pumpkin Chili is from (never home)maker, a site I'd never visited before this review from seitan is my motor.  Seitan is my motor is a great German vegan blog (in English) that I read all the time but have never cooked from because her specialty is baking, and baking is not my thing, unfortunately.  But even when she isn't baking, the recipes look great.

I used my crockpot again here to make the kidney beans from dried, and I tried not even soaking them this time, which worked just fine.  I brought them to boil in water to cover, then cooked them in the crock on high for about 4 hours with a couple bay leaves, an onion cut in half, and a little thyme.  I used some of the cooking liquid in the Chili instead of the veggie broth (just remember you'll need to add a lot of extra salt).  I also roasted a pumpkin and used that instead of the puree from a can, and I sauteed some celery with the onions because I didn't have any corn to add.

The last change I made was I roasted the pumpkin seeds along side the pumpkin and used them to garnish.  It was a good, healthy chili--I have other favorites, but the pumpkin was fun.

I served the chili with a salad.  I tried something new here to make this easy and fast--on Sunday I washed and dried the lettuce, chopped it, and put it in a large plastic container with a tea towel.  I did the same for the other veggies (minus the tea towel): shredded a couple carrots, and chopped some sugar snap peas, green pepper, and celery.  Then I just had to assemble the salad each night, which went really quickly.  I also threw on some onion sprouts and chopped avocado.  I made the dressing in an almost empty Vegenaise jar with dried thyme, mustard, red wine vinegar, and evoo, and used that every evening, too.  I didn't go without a salad all week, because it was so easy.

Finally, I had a slice of garlic toast on the side.  I lightly toast a slice of whole wheat bread, rub it with a half-clove of garlic, butter it with Earth Balance, then throw it back in the toaster oven to get it good and bubbly and crunchy.

Some Delicious Brown Food

So I remember, as a kid, that a meal like this was frozen, and quite a treat...Stouffer Turkey Dinner or something.  But at some point, I think Mom made it herself.  We would smother pieces of buttered bread with shredded leftover turkey and lots of gravy...wow.  After Thanksgiving, but also after other workday meals, this was one of my favorite dinners.  I'm telling you, this lived up to my memory.  Try it.

Why, yes, that is the worst food photograph ever blogged.  But it was damn good food.  And, no animals were harmed in the making of this ugly food...

To start, that is homemade whole wheat bread at the bottom there.  I followed the basic recipe from The Tassajara Bread Book by Edward Espe Brown.  The "turkey" is a thick slice of Vegan Dad's Smoked Veggie Turkey Lunchmeat (not just good here--eat it thinly sliced on sandwiches or see just how much your dog loves it as a soft training treat...).  And the gravy is a riff off of a Seventh Day Adventist recipe from an awesome book called Cooking by the Book by Marcella Lynch.  I wish I had made notes, because I changed it a lot and I wanted to post it here, but I didn't.  :(  I know I started with some onion in Earth Balance and made a roux, added homemade veggie stock and a little soy milk, and I know I added some Marmite, some soy sauce..and some other stuff...    But I bet a mushroom gravy would be even better.  What's your favorite vegan gravy?

Vegan Spinach Salad

Here is some more proof that vegans don't sacrifice taste and in fact eat as well as anyone else (and much better than those people who hate spices, avocados, beets, or anything new).  I heartily enjoyed this salad for four days in a row; having prepared the vegan bacon and the dressing ahead of time, I just threw them together with some spinach and sliced up a few mushrooms.  Rich, complex flavors, and all those fresh greens.  Yum.  Really.

(That's an awesome picture, huh?  Pure luck.  And look how a few of those mushrooms with a little yellow-ish dressing look like hard boiled eggs...a little freaky, actually.)

I started with the Tempeh Bacon.  It needs to marinate for at least a couple hours, then it's fried.  The recipe is from Vegan with a Vengeance...which I don't own...but someone has posted it, and I'll link to it here.  (I do plan to buy the book one of these days.)  The person who posted it doesn't like it much, and, no, you're not going to fool anyone into thinking this is pork, but why would you want to?  It's a really savory, slightly crispy, slightly chewy, rich treat.  It's exactly what I was looking for.  The next component to put together is this Spinach Salad Dressing from Toby Jermain on food.com.  It's so thick, it's more like an onion relish.  But, with all the onion already in the dressing, that's one less component for the leftovers' prep work.  Add the bacon and the dressing over some spinach and thickly sliced mushrooms, and there you go.

Vegetarian again

I've been considering it for a while, but I've quit eating meat, as of a few weeks ago. What really made me finally go ahead and do it was watching Food Inc.  Of course, it's nothing we all don't already know about how terrible factory farms are for both animal and farmer, but it felt like a call to action for me.

I rarely cooked with meat products, anyway, though I usually used chicken broth, and I occasionally used bacon or sausage.  But I almost always ordered something meaty when eating out, and I ate anything offered me by anyone!  I had been on a ham and cheese sandwich kick for a while, and I suppose that's what I'll feel nostalgic about for a while.

Speaking of cheese, I'm aspiring to eventually become vegan this time.  I will have to have in place a suitably decadent cheese substitute, since being without the real thing seems almost like an insurmountable challenge to me.  So I'll probably phase in veganism first by cooking vegan at home and only eating dairy and eggs socially--at restaurants and when it's offered me (I worked with a vegan once who said he only ate "free cheese"--hi, Ryan!).  I am also considering making exceptions for humanely acquired dairy and eggs.

I was a vegetarian for about five years in high school and college, but I'm certain I'll be better at it this time.  I subsisted mainly on different combinations of bread, pasta, cheese and tomato sauce back then!  My friend Heather recently reminded me, too, of my fondness for Campbell's Vegetarian Vegetable Soup sprinkled with Kraft Parmesan--I actually did a homemade version of it the other day for old time's sake.  She's given up meat recently, too!

I'm excited about this new adventure.  I've only used vegetarian cookbooks for about 5 years, now, so I recently bought my first vegan cookbook, Veganomicon, and I'm sure you'll see some dishes from it here shortly!

In the meantime, here is a vegetarian "shepherd's" pie I made shortly before I made the big switch.  I used this recipe from one of my favorite blogs, Cheap Healthy Good. (Click on the picture to see a larger version--it actually looks tastier close up...)